Toronto is hiring consultants to do an $800,000 review of ward boundaries that could lead to more — not fewer — city councillors, thanks to population growth since the last review in 2000.

City council has 44 wards — two councillors for each of the 22 federal ridings. Federal redistribution has given Toronto three more ridings, which would imply an increase to 50 councillors plus the mayor.

The review won’t be completed in time for this year’s elections, but new boundaries are expected to be in place by the 2018 vote.

Councillor John Filion, whose ward is the biggest by population, has been pushing for new boundaries since 2006. Filion said the city was slow to act because redrawing boundaries inevitably means some politicians end up unhappy about losing prize turf.

“It’s impossible to do without sending somebody into retirement because their boundary gets drastically changed,” Filion said. “It pits councillor against councillor.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Rob Ford has repeatedly asserted that Toronto could get by with as few as 22 councillors.

Filion said he and his staff spend most of their time at his North York office analyzing development applications and planning community facilities to serve new residents.

“If I had a large but sleepy ward, that would be one thing, but I’m dealing with a huge number of redevelopment applications and associated traffic problems. It takes up a huge amount of my time and my staff’s time.”

Mayor Ford’s insistence on a smaller council contradicts his message of customer service excellence, said Councillor Adam Vaughan (Ward 20, Trinity-Spadina), whose ward had 76,610 residents as of the 2011 census, in contrast to Ford’s old Etobicoke ward, at 56,720.

“If you’re one of 40,000 people calling a councillor’s office, it’s a lot different than if you’re one of 80,000 people calling,” Vaughan said. “It’s about my residents having access to city hall.”

When the issue of hiring consultants came up last May, before Ford was stripped of many of his mayoral powers, he moved to instruct the consultants to look at cutting the number of wards.

Ford’s motion was defeated at the executive committee, which means “all options are on the table,” said Councillor Gord Perks.

The consultants, a consortium led by the Canadian Urban Institute, are to engage the public and deliver a final report with recommendations by the spring of 2016.

“In my own view, if people want good representation and good service, reducing the number of seats is a bad way to go,” Perks said. “But I want to hear what the public has to say, and I want to wait and see what the outcome is.”

Ideally, the smaller the ward the better, but not if it means a larger council that would be cumbersome, Filion said.

One answer may be to equalize the ward populations at a higher average, such as 65,000.

“I would love to see all the wards at 50,000, but you can’t do that because we’d end up with a council that’s too big,” Filion said. “If you make the wards too small, you end up with arguably too many politicians.”

Another approach would be to beef up staffing for councillors whose wards see a lot of development activity, such as Filion’s ward and Kristyn Wong-Tam’s (Ward 27, Toronto Centre-Rosedale), said Councillor Joe Mihevc.

“You’ll have someone like Peter Leon in Etobicoke Centre, a sleepy community, virtually no development happening, versus someone like Kristyn Wong-Tam and John Filion, who may have dozens of files on the go.

“If it means an extra staff person for a John Filion or a Kristyn Wong-Tam, I’m good with that.”

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